Arts & Letters

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Lost in the Supermarket: Another World Is Possible

Another World Is Possible, various artists, Uncivilized World, $16.98.

By Anastasia Tsioulcas

Both a CD and an anthology of brief essays, Another World Is Possible starts from an intriguing premise: bring together a diverse array of contemporary musicians and essayists from around the globe, making bedfellows of hipster musical icons like Lee “Scratch” Perry and thinkers who are stars in certain political circles, like Noam Chomsky. Then, piece together their individual contributions into a mosaic of counterpoints that address the social, political, economic, and intellectual pitfalls of globalization and the onslaught of Northern/Western cultural hegemony.

The project is the brainchild of Uncivilized World’s founder, Arnaud Frisch, who describes his vision this way: “We want to provoke people who like these artists to read something about the dangers of savage globalization and have a debate about it.” Another World Is Possible has a secondary goal as well. Proceeds from sales go to ATTAC, the French-founded but now internationally organized Association pour la Taxation des Transactions pour l’Aide aux Citoyens (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens), which seeks to implement Nobel Prize-winning American economist James Tobin’s ideas of a tax on currency speculation in order to fund efforts such as combating global warming, poverty, and disease. (In a related move over a year ago, French president Jacques Chirac, speaking at the UN General Assembly, proposed an international tax on airline tickets, among other things, that would fund anti-AIDS, -tuberculosis, and -pollution initiatives. A couple of months ago, the French government acted on this proposal independently and announced that the tax would come into force in France on July 1, 2006.)

Listen to Manu Chao, Tonino Carotone “La trampa”

Another World Is Possible has been issued in two distinctly different editions: one in France, another for the US market (distributed in the States by Koch). It is worth noting that the French release’s CD-sized “book” is nearly 20 pages longer than the US issue. Moreover, all of the essays are translated into English in the American issue, while most of the texts are in their respective original languages in the French version. However, two essays are entirely absent from the American version: that of Bernard Cassen, general director of Le Monde Diplomatique and co-founder of ATTAC, and of Francisco “Chico” Whitaker, co-founder (with Bernard Cassen, in fact) and international secretary of the World Social Forum and executive director of the Brazilian Catholic Bishops Commission for Justice and Peace. Many photos (largely of various anti-globalization protests around the world) were excised from the US edition as well.

Truthfully, I have great difficulty believing that the activists whose words are included here, such as Chomsky and Arundhati Roy, aren’t already familiar to at least a good part (if not the overwhelming majority) of Another World’s anticipated audience: the kind of scenesters who would seek out recordings by Mali’s Salif Keita or Nigeria’s Femi Kuti (son of one of the twentieth century’s most influential, and socially committed, musicians, Fela Kuti), who are two of nearly 20 solo artists and groups rounded up for this project. But no matter: the music is, for the most part, still fabulous, gleaned from musicians as far-flung as France (bands No One Is Innocent and Orchestre National de Barbès), Jamaica (The Skatalites), Ivory Coast (Tiken Jah Fakoly), and the United States (Moby).

Nevertheless, the anthology offers an intriguing assortment of authors, from the aforementioned Chomsky and Roy to Canadian Naomi Klein and Zapatista rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos. The glaring problem with Another World Is Possible’s texts are that they provide only snippets of ideas, in the form of brief essays or reprinted lectures, rather than fully fleshed-out anti-globalization arguments or, even more pressingly, constructive suggestions for alternative courses of action. (Then again, it’s entirely unlikely that anyone who chooses this title wouldn’t already be in the choir to whom the artists and authors here are preaching.) Of course, Another World Is Possible is not meant to be any sort of comprehensive introduction to alter-globalization ideas and ideals—nothing CD-sized could, in all fairness, offer much more—but the decisions of what to include and what to discard are slightly puzzling.

We learn the barest outlines of who the essayists are, for instance. Again, I find it hard to believe that anyone who’d pick up this package wouldn’t already know who Noam Chomsky is; even so, there’s a pithy bio (“Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology”) just in case. So why not provide the same for the musical talents assembled for this project, especially since many of them (Orchestre National de Barbès or Tonino Carotone, for example) are most likely to be far less easily recognizable than, say, Arundhati Roy or Subcomandante Marcos, even to true world-music fans?

Listen to Emir Kusturica, The no smoking orchestra “Lost in the supermarket”

Despite their brevity, the texts offer some compelling facts. Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian women’s and children’s rights activist who won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize notes that 54 of the world’s nations were actually poorer last year than they were in 1990. Ignacio Ramonet, Le Monde Diplomatique’s editor-in-chief and ATTAC’s other founder, cites a UN report that states that a mere four percent of the cumulative revenues of the world’s 225 largest companies would provide sufficient funds to meet the basic food, potable water, education, and healthcare needs of the entire planet.

One of the most fascinating contributions is undoubtedly Arundhati Roy’s; it’s a meditation of sorts upon the role of the artist in society, in which she addresses the artificial divide that others force upon her as a “writer-activist,” as though her fiction is not as political as her overtly political essays. (After her debut novel, The God of Small Things, topped bestseller lists around the globe, Roy wrote on such important topics as India’s nuclear activity, environmentally and socially catastrophic big-dam projects across the world, and the alarming trend of privatization and corporatization of basic public utilities like water and electricity.) That meshing of roles comes to the fore more explicitly in the musical portion of Another World Is Possible. The one commonality between these disparate artists is that they all weave together art and social activism: none of these musicians could ever be thought of as mere “entertainers.” Either their music is often overtly political, as with the UK’s Asian Dub Foundation (ADF) or Algeria’s Idir, or they are active as leaders within their respective communities. Some go even further: French-born and Spanish-based singer, guitarist, and producer Manu Chao regularly donates royalties to the Zapatistas in Chiapas.

However, too much in the musicians’ intentions remains veiled. Another serious omission in both European and American issues of the CD is that neither lyrics nor translations—nor even synopses—are given for any songs, so listeners on both sides of the Atlantic will likely either have to go without understanding many of the tunes’ messages, or else be ready to dedicate some serious Google time to digging up translations. For example, I don’t speak Spanish, and it took a fair amount of time and creative searching to find an explanation of Manu Chao and Tonino Carotone’s “La Trampa” (“The Trap”). The piece’s zany instrumental colors and springy rhythms belie the ferocity of lyrics like: “Caught in the trap, to be your friend, I was caught in the trap of your trust….In the great fair of the lie, you are the king, the king of the day!” Long cheered for his brash sensibilities and talent for finding fabulous collaborators from around the world, Chao is today one of the great influences on the global music scene; this past year, he scored a major hit in producing one of the most critically and commercially successful world-music titles, the Malian singing and guitar-playing duo Amadou and Mariam’s “Dimanche à Bamako” (released in Europe on Because and in the US by Nonesuch Records).

One of Chao’s own most important influences was The Clash, and, unsurprisingly (considering the philosophical spirit of Another World Is Possible), two distinctly different Clash covers find their way onto this album. The first is a version of “Police on My Back” from ADF and France’s Zebda. While the Clash sang about being disaffected English youth in the UK, the song receives an extra tweak here about the second-generation immigrant experience in Europe: the members of ADF come from Britain’s South Asian population; Zebda, from France’s Algerian community. Given the distrust and suspicion that people who look like ADF and Zebda face after September 11, the London train bombings, and, most recently, the Paris riots, the bitter lyrics of “Police on My Back” find renewed relevance, and the groups’ addition of galloping tablas give the song an even more urgent undertone. Similarly, Sarajevo-born filmmaker-cum-musician Emir Kusturica and the No Smoking Orchestra uncover new strata of ironic commentary in The Clash’s “Lost in the Supermarket,” which they give a thoroughly fresh instrumental spin: a raucous Balkan brass band meets reggae’s one-drop beat, with the words delivered in an entirely charming, fractured, and heavily accented English, whose use hints at yet another layer of commentary about globalization and its corresponding lingua franca.

Listen to Underground Resistance “The strangler”

The music portion of Another World Is Possible gradually evolves from a set of block-rocking, hip-twitching dance tunes into moody and reflective electronica. One of the most wonderful tracks is hidden in this second shift: the elegiac, country-tinged “Wives of Farmers” from the Modesto, California, band Grandaddy. This group knows of what they speak: Modesto lies in the heart of the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, and there’s no false admiration or condescension in lyrics like:

Wives of farmers care about the way their husbands feel
Wives of farmers know the power of a home cooked meal
Wives of farmers grow pretty flowers out in the yard
Wives of farmers know that life is sometimes hard.

And while Granddaddy’s paean to a nearly lost way of life in America certainly isn’t any kind of direct commentary on globalization, it does offer a corrective to the “norm” of Northern/Western relentlessly commercial, blinged-out, ever increasingly globalized pop culture. And, in the end, that’s what Another World Is Possible does best. While it doesn’t offer much in the way of answers, it provides a range of other voices: songs and stories firmly rooted in their respective cultural grounds—voices often lost in the mechanized din of globalization.